The Gentleman In the Parlour (9 page)

But by this time I knew my public and this joke, though
I hope not coarse, just touched the obscene as a mosquito touches your face and then flies away buzzing when you slap. It amused me very much, and as I rode along I thought of the headman and the elders of the village I was approaching, on their knees on the floor in front of me, shaking with laughter and rolling from side to side.

We arrived. The village chief was a man of fifty-seven and he had been headman for thirty years. He brought his nephew, a shy youth with the beginnings of a beard, four or five elders and the clerk, who sat a little by himself, a man of immeasurable age, wrinkled, with a sparse grey beard, a man so old that he seemed hardly human. He looked like a pagoda which is tumbling into ruin and soon the encroaching jungle will fall upon it and it will be no more.

In due time I made my speech and when I came to my good joke the interpreter giggled and his eyes glistened. I was pleased. I finished and sat back in my chair while he translated my winged words. The little half-circle of listeners turned from me to him and watched him with dark, attentive eyes. He was a good speaker, my interpreter, fluent, with a gift of easy and descriptive gesture. I always felt that he did me justice. I had never made a wittier speech. I was surprised that it did not seem to go down. Not a smile rewarded any of my sallies; they listened politely, but no change in their expression suggested that they were either interested or amused. I had kept my best joke for the last and as I reckoned that it was approaching, a smile on my lips, I leaned forward. The interpreter finished. Not a laugh, not a chuckle. I will admit that I was put out. I signified to the headman that the ceremony was at an end, they shikoed, struggled to their feet, and one after the other left the bungalow.

For a moment I hesitated.

‘They didn't seem to me very intelligent,' I hazarded.

‘They were the stupidest lot of people we've come across,' said my interpreter, and there was indignation
in his tone. ‘I've made the same jokes every day and this is the first time they've never laughed.'

I was a trifled startled. I was not sure that I understood.

‘I beg your pardon?' I said.

‘What for you say all sorts of different things, sir? You take too much trouble for ignorant men like that. I make the same speech every day and they like it very much.'

I was silent for a moment.

‘For all you care I might just as well say the multiplication table,' I said then, with what I thought a certain irony.

My interpreter smiled brightly, flashing a great many white teeth at me.

‘Yes, sir, that will save you a lot of trouble,' he said. ‘You say the multiplication table and then I make my speech.'

The worst of it was that I could not be quite certain that I remembered it.

When I set out in the early morning the dew was so heavy that I could see it falling, and the sky was grey; but in a little while the sun pierced through and in the sky, blue now, the cumulus clouds were like white sea-monsters gambolling sedately round the North Pole. The country was thinly peopled and on each side of the road was the jungle. For some days we went through pleasant uplands by a broad track, unmetalled but hard, its surface deeply furrowed by the passage of bullock-carts. Now and then I saw a pigeon and now and then a crow, but there were few birds. Then leaving the open spaces we passed through secluded hills and forests of bamboo. A bamboo forest is a graceful thing. It has the air of an enchanted wood and you can imagine that in its green shade the
princess, heroine of an Eastern story, and the prince her lover might very properly undergo their incredible and fantastic adventures. When the sun shines through and a tenuous breeze flutters its elegant leaves, the effect is charmingly unreal: it has a beauty not of nature, but of the theatre.

At last we arrived at the Salween. This is one of the great rivers that rise far up in the Tibetan steppes, the Bramahputra, the Irrawaddy, the Salween and the Mehkong, and roll southwards in parallel courses to pour their mighty waters into the Indian Ocean. Being very ignorant I had never heard of it till I went to Burma and even then it was nothing to me but a name. It had none of the associations that are for ever attached to such rivers as the Ganges, the Tiber and the Guadalquiver. It was only as I went along that it gained a meaning to me and with a meaning mystery. It was a measure of distance, we were seven days from the Salween, then six; it seemed very remote; and at Mandalay I had heard people say:

‘Don't the Rogers live on the Salween? You must go and stay with them when you cross.'

‘Oh, my dear fellow,' someone expostulated, ‘they live right down on the Siamese frontier, he won't be going within three weeks' journey of them.'

And when we passed some rare traveller on the road perhaps my interpreter after talking to him would come and tell me that he had crossed the Salween three days before. The water was high, but was going down; in bad weather it was no joke crossing. ‘Beyond the Salween' had a stirring sound and the country seemed dim and aloof. I added one little impression to another, a detached fact, a word, an epithet, the recollection of an engraving in an old book, enriching the name with associations as the lover in Stendhal's book decks his beloved with the jewels of his fancy, and soon the thought of the Salween intoxicated my imagination. It became the Oriental river of my dreams, a broad stream, deep and secret, flowing
through wooded hills, and it had romance, and a dark mystery so that you could scarcely believe that it rose here and there poured itself into the ocean, but like a symbol of eternity flowed from an unknown source to lose itself at last in an unknown sea.

We were two days from the Salween; then one. We left the high road and took a rocky path that wound through the jungle in and out of the hills. There was a heavy fog and the bamboos on each side were ghostly. They were like the pale wraiths of giant armies that had fought desperate wars in the beginning of the world's long history and now, lowering, waited in ominous silence, waited and watched for one knew not what. But every now and then, straight and imposing, rose dimly the shadow of a tall, an immensely tall tree. An unseen brook babbled noisily, but for the rest silence surrounded one. No birds sang and the crickets were still. One seemed to go stealthily, as though one had no business there, and dangers encompassed one all about. Spectral eyes seemed to watch one. Once when a branch broke and fell to the ground it was with so sharp and unexpected a sound that it startled one like a pistol shot.

But at last we came out into the sunshine and soon passed through a bedraggled village. Suddenly I saw the Salween shining silvery in front of me. I was prepared to feel like stout Cortez on his peak and was more than ready to look upon that sheet of water with a wild surmise, but I had already exhausted the emotion it had to offer me. It was a more ordinary and less imposing stream than I had expected; indeed then, and there, it was no wider than the Thames at Chelsea Bridge. It flowed without turbulence, swiftly and silently.

The raft (two dug-outs on which was built a platform of bamboos) was at the water's edge and we set about unloading the mules. One of them, seized with a sudden panic, bolted for the river and before anyone could stop him plunged in. He was carried away on the current,
I would never have thought that that turbid, sluggish stream had such a power; he was swept along the reach, swiftly, swiftly, and the muleteers shouted and waved their arms. We could see the poor brute struggling desperately, but it was inevitable that he would be drowned and I was thankful when a bend of the river robbed me of the sight of him. When with my pony and my personal effects I was ferried across the stream I looked at it with more respect, and since the raft seemed to me none too secure I was not sorry when I reached the other side.

The bungalow was on the top of the bank. It was surrounded by lawns and flowers. Poinsettias enriched it with their brilliant hues. It had a little less than the austerity common to the bungalows of the PWD and I was glad that I had chosen this place to linger for a day or two in order to rest the mules and my own weary limbs. From the windows the river shut in by the hills looked like an ornamental water. I watched the raft going backwards and forwards bringing over the mules and their loads. The muleteers were cheerful because they were to get their rest and I had given the headman a trifling sum so that they could have a treat.

Then, their duties accomplished and the servants having unpacked my things, peace descended upon the scene, and the river, empty as though man had never adventured up its winding defiles, regained its dim remoteness. There was not a sound. The day waned and the peace of the water, the peace of the tree-clad hills and the peace of the evening were three exquisite things. There is a moment just before sundown when the trees seem to detach themselves from the dark mass of the jungle and become individuals. Then you cannot see the wood for the trees. In the magic of the hour they seem to acquire a life of a new kind so that it is not hard to imagine that spirits inhabit them and with dusk they will have the power to change their places.
You feel that at some uncertain moment some strange thing will happen to them and they will be wondrously transfigured. You hold your breath waiting for a marvel the thought of which stirs your heart with a kind of terrified eagerness. But the night falls; the moment has passed and once more the jungle takes them back. It takes them back as the world takes young people who, feeling in themselves the genius which is youth, hesitate for an instant on the brink of a great adventure of the spirit, and then engulfed by their surroundings sink back into the vast anonymity of human kind. The trees again become part of the wood; they are still and if not lifeless, alive only with the sullen and stubborn life of the jungle.

The spot was so lovely and the bungalow with its lawns and trees so homelike and peaceful that for a moment I toyed with the notion of staying there not a day, but a year, not a year but all my life. Ten days from a railhead and my only communication with the outside world the trains of mules that passed occasionally between Taunggyi and Keng Tung, my only intercourse the villagers from the bedraggled village on the other side of the river, and so to spend the years away from the turmoil, the envy and bitterness and malice of the world, with my thoughts, my books, my dog and my gun and all about me the vast, mysterious and luxuriant jungle. But alas, life does not consist only of years, but of hours, the day has twenty-four and it is no paradox that they are harder to get through than a year; and I knew that in a week my restless spirit would drive me on, to no envisaged goal it is true, but on as dead leaves are blown hither and thither to no purpose by a gusty wind. But being a writer (no poet, alas! but merely a writer of stories) I was able to lead for others a life I could not lead for myself. This was a fit scene for an idyll of young lovers and I let my fancy wander as I devised a story to fit the tranquil and lovely scene. But, I do not know why unless it is that in beauty is always something tragic, my
invention threw itself into a perverse mould and disaster fell upon the thin wraiths of my imagination.

But on a sudden I heard a commotion in the compound and my Ghurka servant coming in at that moment with a gin and bitters, with which I was accustomed to bid the departing day farewell, I asked him what was the matter. He spoke tolerable English.

‘The mule that was drowned, he come back,' he said.

‘Dead or alive?' I asked.

‘Oh, he alive all right. The mule fellow he give mule a damn good beating.'

‘Why?'

‘Teach him not to show off.'

Poor mule! Freedom from the heavy load and the saddle that galled his sores, and that wild excitement when he saw the broad river before him and the green hills on the other side. Oh, for an escapade! Just a fling after all those days of humdrum labour and the joy of feeling the strength of one's limbs. The dash down to the river and then the irresistible force of the stream that carried one off, the desperate effort and the panting, the sudden fear of death, and at last a couple of miles down, the struggle to the safe shore. The scamper along a jungle path and then the approach of night. Well, one had had one's fling and one felt all the better for it, now one could go back quite quietly to the compound where all the other mules were and one was ready next day or the day after to take up one's load again and go quietly on one's way in the file, one's nose at the tail of the mule ahead of one; and when one got back, happy and rested after the adventure, they beat one because they said one had been showing off. As if one cared enough for them to bother to show off. Oh, well, it was worth a hiding. Whoops, dearie!

I took to the road once more. One day followed another with a monotony in which was nothing tedious. At dawn a cock, crowing loudly, woke me; and the various sounds in the compound, first one and then after a pause another, stealing upon the silence of the night a little uncertainly, as in a symphony one instrument takes up after another the first notes of a theme, the theme of the day and the labour of man, the various sounds in the compound prevented me from going to sleep again: there was the bell around the neck of a mule that tinkled as he stirred or the shake another gave himself and the hee-haw of an ass; there were the lazy movements of the muleteers, their muffled talk, and their cries as they called their beasts. The gathering light crept into my room. Then I heard my servants moving and in a little while my Ghurka boy, Rang Lal by name, brought me my tea and took down my mosquito curtains. I drank the tea and smoked the first delicious cigarette of the day. Pleasant thoughts crowded upon me, scraps of dialogue, a metaphor or a sonorous phrase, a trait or two to add to a character, an episode, and it was charming to lie there idly and let my fancy wander. But Rang Lal brought in my shaving water, silently, and the thought that it would soon grow cold urged me to get up. I shaved and had my bath and breakfast was ready. If I was in luck the headman of the village or the
durwan
of the bungalow had made me a present of a papaia. This is a fruit that many people dislike and it is true that it needs getting used to; but when you have, you cannot but acquire a passion for it. It combines a clean and delicate savour with medicinal virtues (for does it not contain some almost incredible
percentage of pepsine?) so that in eating it you not only satisfy the grossness of your appetite, but attend likewise to your soul's welfare. It is like a beautiful woman whose conversation is instructive and elevating.